1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to electronic commerce and, more particularly, an improved system and methodology for dynamic customization and personalization of Internet content.
2. Description of the Background Art
An increasing volume of consumer and business transactions are today conducted on e-commerce sites rather than (or in addition to) face to face in traditional brick and mortar environments. Today's e-commerce sites and their operations are well known and understood. A typical e-commerce site, such as Amazon.com, has a catalog or list of products and services that are offered through the site. It also includes marketing and promotional materials that solicit orders for these products and services. After a customer enters the Web site, the customer uses a browser to view HTML pages containing product descriptions, marketing collateral, pricing, and other information. Most e-commerce vendors have made significant investments in their Web sites to provide a compelling user experience for their customers. A significant part of this effort is to provide customers with a consistent look and feel that enables users to better navigate the site and encourages these customers to remain on the vendor's site.
In order to retain customers and increase revenues, e-commerce vendors are also continually looking for ways to expand their sites by offering additional products and services. They endeavor to act as a “one-stop shop” providing a wide range of products and services to their customers. However, in expanding the scope of their offerings, these vendors must increasingly rely on third party suppliers as they do not have all of the necessary resources or capabilities to directly manufacture, process, and fulfill customer orders for all of this wide range of products and services. These e-commerce vendors can, of course, easily accept and fulfill orders for many third party products that they stock in inventory in the manner described above. For example, K-Mart, or its e-commerce arm Bluelight.com, may offer cameras and accessories from various manufacturers that K-Mart has purchased and has available in its inventory. In this case, K-Mart can accept and fulfill a customer order for a camera placed on its Bluelight.com Web site without the need for further interaction with its supplier and in a manner that is relatively transparent to the customer ordering these products.
However, in other cases the e-commerce vendor may not have the necessary capabilities or resources to independently accept and fulfill orders for certain third party products or services. This is particularly true in the case of orders for more complex products or services involving a large amount of customization by the customer. For example, assume that a retailer like K-Mart wants to offer photograph or image processing services for its customers in conjunction with the sale of cameras, film, and other accessories. K-Mart may not have a photo processing laboratory or the necessary processing equipment or expertise to directly provide photograph or digital image processing services and, thus, may need to outsource fulfillment. In the particular case of photo finishing, K-Mart and most other traditional “brick and mortar” retailers have historically served as middlemen in connection with the supply of photo processing services to their customers. These retailers often have “photo centers” where customers drop off film and later return to pick up prints (and perhaps also get copies of the prints as digital images on CD-ROMs). However the actual processing has been traditionally handled by laboratories such as Kodak that have the appropriate resources and expertise to better perform these services. A large number of similar situations exist in which both e-commerce and brick and mortar retailers prefer to outsource the supply of a particular product or service to a third party rather than to make the considerable investment necessary to develop their own offering. These types of custom orders for third party products and services can be very difficult for the e-commerce vendor to offer through its standard e-commerce site ordering and fulfillment systems as it has to balance and act as middleman between the requirements of its customers and the requirements of its supplier.
E-commerce vendors want to offer third party services to provide a broader offering to their customers. However these vendors also want to be able to offer these third party products and services in a manner that is customized to have a look and feel consistent with the vendor's own web site. In particular, these vendors want to be able to offer third party products and services in a manner that makes these products and services appear as a vendor-branded offering. Suppliers of these third party products and services are interested in fulfilling these requirements in order to meet the requirements of their e-commerce vendor partners/customers. However, these suppliers want to avoid developing and implementing separate offerings for every e-commerce vendor in view of the significant time, costs, and operating complexities involved. For example, a supplier may provide photo-processing services through dozens of different retailers. This supplier wants to be able to use the same systems and applications for each of these retailers, thereby avoiding the cost and expense of developing and implementing a custom offering for each retailer. The supplier also wants to be able to use the same hardware for multiple partners rather than to incur the expense of purchasing, installing, and supporting a separate hardware installation for each partner. At the same time, the supplier wants the ability to customize or personalize the user interface of the solution for particular retailers in order to make the supplier offering appear like a branded offering of its particular retailer customer.
One approach for using the same hardware to provide service to multiple partners is that of virtual hosting. Virtual hosting enables a company to use a third party to host its Internet Web site. Virtual hosting involves a server (computer and associated programs) at a third party location that is shared by multiple Web site owners so that each owner can use and administer the server as if it had control of its own server. Although virtual hosting enables one machine or cluster of machines to be shared by multiple customers, it does not avoid the requirement for each user to personalize (i.e., develop) its own custom user interface. Thus, considerable duplication of effort is still required to develop a personalized user interface for each partner or customer. Although virtual hosting enables the same back-end servers to be used for multiple partners, this approach still requires development and support of custom pages for each partner in order to conform to each partner's branding requirements. A supplier that is delivering similar services through multiple partners wants to avoid the delay and expense inherent in developing, implementing, and supporting a custom interface for each partner/customer.
Another approach that has been used to personalize Web pages is to “special case” pages or portions of pages to enable special requirements to be addressed. Special casing involves writing unique code to handle particular situations. In this context, special casing would be used to personalize particular text or graphics on a Web page depending, for example, on the source making the request for reviewing a particular item. Special casing pages may be a workable solution when a supplier has a very small number of partners. However, if the supplier has a larger number of partners this approach involves considerable development effort and results in a much more complex environment to maintain on an ongoing basis. For example, if the supplier wants to make changes to its offering, these changes may have to be rolled down into a number of different Web page segments for each of the various partners involved. For these reasons, special casing is not a cost-effective, long-term approach if the supplier has more than one or two partners.
What is required is an improved method for personalization of Web pages and other content to enable the same hardware and software environment to be used to deliver a personalized solution for multiple partners. Ideally, multiple partners would utilize the same environment, however this environment would generate Web pages and content with a personalized look and feel consistent with each partner's branding. This solution should be cost effective to implement and support on behalf of multiple partners, while individually branding each partner's offering. The present invention fulfills these and other needs.